Pioneering experimental improvisational group Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) formed in Rome in 1966, forging an approach that has had a lasting impact on noise, improv and beyond. Performing at this rare show will be 3 of the founding members of the group - and all renowned composers in the their own right - Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum, and Frederic Rzewski.

MEV

Over the years, MEV's members have included Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum, Frederic Rzewski, Allan Bryant, Carol Plantamura, Ivan Vandor, Steve Lacy, and Jon Phetteplace. One of the earliest groups to use synthesizers to transform sounds (with core member Richard Teitelbaum having owned the first Moog synthesizer in Europe), M.E.V. blend acoustic and electronic sound sources with a stated dedication to "the merging of the the individual into the collective". Having started out with the intention of interpreting compositions that involved electronics by composers such as John Cage, M.E.V. achieved early notoriety in Italy for their ability to generate riots. Perhaps best described as a movement rather than a single band - at one stage in the early '70s, there were three different (but related) bands that went by the name - M.E.V. draw on over 40 years of defiantly inventive sonic exploration that is sometimes confrontational and never less than compelling.

"Accord is the implied ideal, but in practice MEV enact the tempestuous debate, the discord, the exhilaration of the struggle. Temporary forms coalesce; none remains stable for long. An integrated but yeasty mix of electronics and acoustic instruments has become a familiar feature of groups such as Supersilent and Sweethearts In A Drugstore, but it's seldom been achieved with the improvisatory brilliance and dramatic unpredictability of much of the material on MEV 40." - Julian Cowley, THE WIRE

"Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) was begun one evening in the spring of 1966 by allan bryant, alvin curran, jon phetteplace, carol plantamura, frederic rzweski, richard teitelbaum and ivan vandor in a room in rome overlooking the pantheon. mev’s music right from the start was also totally open, allowing all and everything to come in and seeking in every way to get out beyond the heartless conventions of contemporary music. taking its cue from tudor and cage, mev began sticking contact mics to anything that sounded and amplified their raw sounds: bed springs, sheets of glass, tin cans, rubber bands, toy pianos, sex vibrators, and assorted metal junk; a crushed old trumpet, cello and tenor sax kept us within musical credibility, while a home-made synthesizer of some 48 oscillators along with the first moog synthesizer in europe gave our otherwise neo-primitive sound an inimitable edge. in the name of the collectivity, the group abandoned both written scores and leadership and replaced them with improvisation and critical listening. rehearsals and concerts were begun at the appropriate time by a kind of spontaneous combustion and continued until total exhaustion set in. it mattered little who played what when or how, but the fragile bond of human trust that linked us all in every moment remained unbroken. the music could go anywhere, gliding into self-regenerating unity or lurching into irrevocable chaos—both were valuable goals. in the general euphoria of the times, mev thought it had re-invented music; in any case it had certainly rediscovered it." — Alvin Curran



ALVIN CURRAN

Democratic, irreverent and traditionally experimental, Curran travels in a computerized covered wagon between the Golden Gate and the Tiber River, and makes music for every occasion with any sounding phenomena -- a volatile mix of lyricism and chaos, structure and indeterminacy, fog horns, fiddles and fiddle heads. He is dedicated to the restoration of dignity to the profession of making non-commercial music as part of a personal search for future social, political and spiritual forms.

Curran's music-making embraces all the contradictions (composed/improvised, tonal/atonal, maximal/minimal...) in a serene dialectical encounter. His more than 150 works feature taped/sampled natural sounds, piano, synthesizers, computers, violin, percussion, shofar, ship horns, accordion and chorus. Whether in the intimate form of his well-known solo performances, or pure chamber music, experimental radio works or large-scale site-specific sound environments and installations, all forge a very personal language from all the languages through dedicated research and recombinant invention.



RICHARD TEITELBAUM

Richard Teitelbaum is an American composer, keyboardist, and improvisor. Born in New York, he is a former student of Allen Forte, Mel Powell, and Luigi Nono. He is best known for his live electronic music and synthesizer performance. For example, he brought the first Moog synthesizer to Europe. He is also involved with world music and uses Japanese, Indian, and western classical instruments and notation.

He studied in Italy with Luigi Nono and Goffredo Petrassi. While in Italy, he became a founding member of Musica Elettronica Viva with Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzewski. He has also collaborated with Anthony Braxton, Nam June Paik, Joan Jonas, Andrew Cyrille, and Leroy Jenkins, among others.



FREDERIC RZEWSKI

Frederic Anthony Rzewski is an American composer and virtuoso pianist. He attended Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton, where his teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Milton Babbitt. In 1960, he went to Italy, a trip which was formative in his future musical development. In addition to studying with Luigi Dallapiccola, he began a career as a performer of new piano music, often with an improvisatory element. A few years later he was a co-founder of Musica Elettronica Viva with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum. Musica Elettronica Viva conceived music as a collective, collaborative process, with improvisation and live electronic instruments prominently featured. In 1971 he returned to New York.

Many of Rzewski's works are inspired by secular and socio-historical themes, show a deep political conscience and feature improvisational elements. Some of his better-known works include The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (36 variations on the Sergio Ortega song El pueblo unido jamás será vencido), a set of virtuosic piano variations written as a companion piece to Beethoven's Diabelli Variations; Coming Together, which is a setting of letters from Sam Melville, an inmate at Attica State Prison, at the time of the famous riots there (1971); North American Ballads; Night Crossing with Fisherman; Fougues; Fantasia and Sonata; The Price of Oil, and Le Silence des Espaces Infinis, both of which use graphical notation; Les Moutons de Panurge; and the Antigone-Legend, which features a principled opposition to the policies of the State, and which was premiered on the night that the United States bombed Libya in April 1986. Among his most recent compositions, the most interesting are the Nanosonatas (2006~2010) and the Cadenza con o senza Beethoven (2003), written for Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. Rzewski played the solo part in the world premiere of his piano concerto at the 2013 BBC Proms.